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Navigating COVID-19: A Simplified Guide to Resources for SMBs

While there is a breadth of online resources available to small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be hard to sift through everything. We’ve come up with a simple guide, organized by seven common COVID-19 objectives, including:

Ensuring safety

Communicating with customers

Updating your listings

Adjusting your marketing and ad campaigns

Managing finances

Working remotely, and

Making sense of it all

Every business is different, so this is not a prioritized plan of action or an exhaustive list. Our hope is to give you some solid starting points and sound advice from trusted sources, so you can stay on track with what is important to you.

1. Ensuring safety

Though we may be past the preparation stage, ongoing protective measures are important for businesses still operating and for reopening those that are currently closed.

Communicating with Employees: Workable offers some helpful templates for this

The Chamber of Commerce is one of the reputable resources for ensuring your business is up to COVID-19 safety standards.

2. Communicating with customers

It’s important to communicate to your customers the status of your operations, what safety measures you are taking, the best way to get in touch with you for questions or concerns, and where to find updates. Make sure you’ve covered all of your channels, including:

Email: Send separate emails to your current customers versus your broader community (newsletter subscribers, for example) so you can proactively address specific concerns.

Voicemail greeting: Provide the date, essential information, as well as any online channels you are using for updates.

Social media profiles: Create a pinned post that provides your COVID-19 response or links to it on your website.

Signage at your location: Make sure to post if you have a brick-and-mortar location.

Homepage: Make some kind of modification to your homepage to indicate that you’re on top of the situation. Depending on your business, this may mean a simple sticky notification bar, a link to a COVID-19 page, or a full-page rework.

Make some kind of modification to your homepage to ensure customers you're on top of your COVID-19 response.

3. Updating your Google My Business listing

You don’t need to update all of your online listings, but as consumers rely heavily on Google for real-time information, this is one to prioritize. To make edits to your listing, go to google.com/business and make sure you’re logged in as your business account, not your personal gmail account (which you could be if you’re using a home computer). Here is what to update:

Hours: There is also now an option to mark your business as temporarily closed.

You can now set a "temporarily closed" status on Google My Business.

From the business: Describe your applicable services, such as “contact-free delivery,” or announce your closing.

Convey information through the "From the business" section of your Google My Business listing

Attributes: Make sure any applicable attributes are checked off, such as delivery, pick-up, or drive-thru.

Posts: “What’s New” posts disappear after seven days, so don’t treat your profile as a timeline for updates. Use an “Events” post where you can set a time frame.

Use Google Posts to communicate with customers right on search engine results pages.

4. Adjusting your marketing and messaging

The coronavirus has caused drastic shifts in both consumer needs and business goals. It’s important to adjust your marketing strategies and messaging accordingly—not just to stay relevant, but also to prevent coming off as insensitive. Between coming up with new ideas and auditing existing campaigns, there is a lot involved with this, so below you’ll find a link to our extensive guide as well as some takeaways.

5. Taking financial measures

There are both pre-existing and new coronavirus-specific options available to help small businesses bear the financial burdens brought on by this outbreak. For example, the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program. These lists will help you to identify what’s applicable to your business:

Also, SCORE (the Service Corps of Retired Executives) provides free remote one-on-one mentoring, plus workshops, webinars, and help with applying for loans. You can view their coronavirus resource page to learn more.

6. Working remotely

Even if your business is able to keep operating with your employees at home, that’s still a huge adjustment. Working remotely comes with its own set of requirements and considerations. Here are some resources that can help you with maintaining output, morale, and connectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Productivity: If you’re one of the many businesses that uses Google’s free apps (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc.), you might find their Tips to Work With Remote Teams helpful.

7. Understanding the impact

There’s no shortage of content available to describe the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, but Wordstream has been doing its own data collection and analysis from a small business perspective. You can hear some insights in our special COVID-19 episode of the Goal Talk Podcast, and you can view our view our findings in the below posts:

COVID-19 data from a marketing perspective can help you pivot accordingly.

There is a lot to be done in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but resources are available to help you with what is within your control. Do the best you can, and take things one moment at a time. We’re all in this together.

Kristen McCormick

Kristen is the Content Marketing Manager at WordStream, where she helps businesses to make sense of their online marketing and advertising. She specializes in local SEO, copywriting, and conversion optimization, and she finds life to be exponentially more delightful on a bicycle.